"The Mountain Maker" (Alice Springs Caterpillar Myth)
Oil on Board
90x121cm
Signed Lower Right, Titled Lower Left
Prov: Private Collection Adelaide
$8,000-12,000
The Arrernte people are the traditional owners of the Alice Springs area. Their stories tell how all the places in and around Alice Springs were formed by giant caterpillars, most notably the MacDonnell Ranges which straddle Alice Springs and run east and west of the town for over 600 kilometres.
The caterpillar belonging to the local Alice Springs area is the Yeperenye. The Yeperenye’s main camp was Mparntwe which is the Arrernte tribe’s name for Alice Springs. The giant Yeperenye caterpillars originated in Emily Gap, about 10km east of Alice Springs. From there they moved out and formed the land as it is today by creating the Ranges, the rivers, waterholes, gorges and tracks. Sometimes they shaped the land with their own bodies, and sometimes they used their Dreamtime powers to simply call things into existence, and sometimes they worked very hard in creating the MacDonnell Ranges.
These caterpillars are perhaps the most important ancestral beings for the Arrernte people of Alice Springs.
The caterpillars remain in the region today.
Aboriginal creation stories became the defining subject of Ainslie Roberts’ career. His interest developed through his travels in Central and northern Australia and his association with ethnologist Charles P. Mountford, who had spent many years recording Aboriginal stories, beliefs and cultural traditions. Roberts began translating these narratives into paintings, developing a highly recognisable visual language of stylised figures, animals, landscape forms and strong decorative colour.
The collaboration between Roberts and Mountford brought these paintings to a wide audience. In 1965 they published The Dreamtime: Australian Aboriginal Myths in Paintings, combining Roberts’ images with Mountford’s written accounts of the stories. Its success
was followed by The Dawn of Time and The First Sunrise, establishing Roberts as an artist closely associated with the visual interpretation of Aboriginal mythology. The paintings explored creation narratives from different regions of Australia, including stories explaining the origins of animals, natural features and celestial bodies, as well as ideas concerning ancestral beings, kinship and traditional law.
Roberts did not present these works as traditional Aboriginal art, but as his own interpretations, painted in a distinctly personal and Western pictorial style. Through this extensive series he sought to communicate the antiquity and complexity of Aboriginal cultural traditions to a broader Australian audience. The present three paintings belong to this important body of work and represent the subject for which Roberts remains best known.
